By Simon Woodhead
As we continue to push our US expansion we thought it long overdue to update our UK/international rate sheets for the US. Customers with a 499 Filer ID wanting full NPA-NXX (220k+ prefixes) rate sheets can deal with Simwood Inc directly; this change relates to our international A-Z decks and follows on from our improvements to UK fixed and UK mobile recently and will be visible in the next rate update.
In recent times the US has appeared essentially as a single blended rate. This is infinitely preferable to hundreds of thousands of distinct rates, but has some limitations. It requires that we blend a country with rates ranging from a few thousandths of a cent up to approaching $1 into a single rate. Doing so, especially with the market at the lower end of this range, means we can’t offer the best value to typical traffic flows which would otherwise be at the lower end, and exposes us to risk from arbitrage.
There’s also a peculiar dynamic in the US which suggests that if you’re not the first in route, i.e. the lowest price, your costs go up. It follows that another carrier is getting first-dibs on the traffic and the expensive overflow is falling onto those lower down the ladder. We obviously want to be your first in route and if another operator is giving an aggressive, but higher, blended rate then it makes sense to use us for the lower bands and to send them the traffic that would otherwise be more expensive with us. With the changes we’ve made today, we’ve introduced breakouts catching the majority of your traffic at a much lower price point than any blended rate, which should dramatically cut your US termination costs.
We’ve taken the single US rate and replaced it with:
- “United States – Simwood”
Our own US number ranges, growing as they come on stream. - “United States – Band 1” through to “Band 5”
These aggregate prefixes by cost band. You should find that the majority of your traffic hits Band 1, being the major population centres and broadly 70% of the the prefixes available. By contrast, Band 5 should rarely be hit with a normal traffic profile as it is circa 0.3% of prefixes, in locations unlikely to see legitimate volume. Band 2-4 are a graduated scale in between.
Over the coming months you will likely see these rates track lower as we gather new data on the actual blend within each band.
